Is Google… Evil?

Google still struggles to make its autocomplete feature not offend people on the regular.

by Paris Martineau

Type something into Google and you’ll be met with an ever-changing list of suggestions as the company’s many algorithms try their hardest to snatch the words right out of your mouth. Most of these predictions will be fine, some even eerily correct, but the others may be sexist, racist, or somewhere in between. Google has had a search prediction problem practically since the feature came online in 2008. Innocuous queries suddenly called into question by the search box’s seemingly unbiased nudges: “feminists are… sexist?” “Hitler is… my hero?”

Over the last two years Google has been embroiled in scandal after scandal thanks to the dubious nature of the company’s auto-predictions. In a Friday post on the Google blog, Google’s public search liaison announced that the company is actively trying to be less awful when it comes to its autogenerated suggestions. The post stated that it would be loosening up how it defines “inappropriate predictions” in an attempt to stop accidentally offending users.

One of the first truly viral incidents happened late 2016, when Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr made the mistake of typing seven seemingly simple letters into Google: “a-r-e j-e-w-s.” Instead of, you know, any normal autosuggestions, Google chucked back a chilling response: “are jews evil?”

“[Google] strives to give you the best, most relevant results,” wrote Cadwalladr. “And in this instance the third-best, most relevant result to the search query ‘are Jews… ‘ is a link to an article from stormfront.org, a neo-Nazi website. The fifth is a YouTube video: ‘Why the Jews are Evil. Why we are against them.’”

This problem isn’t even remotely restricted to Google; it, has spread to Google property YouTube too.

Last November, dozens of users reported that when they typed the perfectly innocuous phrase “how to have” into the totally-not-problematic-at-all video sharing site, they were met with, well…

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a YouTube spokesperson said: “Earlier today our teams were alerted to this awful autocomplete result and we worked to quickly remove it,” the company said. “We are investigating this matter to determine what was behind the appearance of this autocompletion.”